Highlights from the Blockchain and Bitcoin Conference Prague

The Blockchain and Bitcoin Conference Prague 2017 took place on May 17, with attendees hearing from speakers on topics ranging from investing, mining, and regulation. The conference was held next to Vienna House in a hotel in the Andel district of the Czech capital. The area hosts a shopping centre with a bitcoin ATM and is across the river Vltava from the ‘old city.’

Here we detail some of the highlights from the event.

One of the most interesting speakers was WAVES CEO and Founder Sasha Ivanov. The altcoin has been making rapid progress, recently entering into the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization according to CoinMarketCap and pushing into the top 20 on CoinGecko.

WAVES is an open blockchain platform, while Bitcoin is for money transfer it is not meant to store arbitrary data. Ivanov said that Ethereum is a great low-level approach, but has scalability issues. He says yes it is cool, flexible, but there are not too many production systems built on Ethereum at this stage.

Ivanov goes onto say that we don’t have any open blockchains that are production ready. Permissioned systems are more stable but they are not a blockchain. He says said that while what some banks were doing is cool, it is some sort of middle ground between the legacy system and blockchain technology. Ivanov stated that within ten years we should have production-ready solutions for open blockchains.

The WAVES founder also hinted at the next big thing in cryptocurrency; authenticated data structures. While most people point to storage of the blockchain as a major problem for adoption, a lesser known problem is that of state storage. To overcome these setbacks, WAVES will use authenticated data structures which are “going to be big in crypto” Ivanov reckons.

Buy Crypto at eToro (USA)

eToro is a multi-asset platform which offers CFD and non CFD products. 76% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. You should consider whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.